Jeff’s Ethereum ÐΞV Update II

Firstly, happy new year! It’s been a really great year. With a little bit of luck, this year will be even better than last year. It has been too long since I updated my position and the Go team’s position due to lack of time. I’ve been incredibly busy and so much has happened over the past two months that I’ve barely had time to sit down and evaluate it all.

As you all know, an audit is coming up soon and my little baby (go-ethereum!) will soon be getting a full check-up. The audit team breaks it down to determine if the repository contains incorrect implementations and searches for major security flaws in its design and implementation. We’ve been very robust with our testing, implementation detail testing, and consensus testing (thanks Christoph), and we’ll continue to add more testing over time. We’ll see how they hold up during the audit. (We’re sure it’ll be okay, but it’s still a little scary. (-:)

Development

PoC-7 It’s been out for about a week now and has been pretty stable (and getting bigger!). We are working hard to finalize PoC-8, which already includes numerous small changes.

• I adjusted the blocking time to: 12 seconds (was 4 seconds)
• By code PREVHASH became Block Hash (N) thus PREVHASH = block hash (number – 1)
• Added an additional precompiled contract at address 0x04 that returns the given input (behaves like copy/memcpy).

Advance

P2P

Felix has been hard at work on a new P2P package, which is currently at v0.1 (PoC-7) and will soon have its first upgrade to PoC-8. Felix did an amazing job with the packaging design and is a real pleasure to work with. The automatically generated documentation can be found here: GoDoc.

whisper

About a month ago I finished the first draft. whisper For our Go implementation, we now forward whisper messages across the network and use the P2P package mentioned earlier. The Go API is relatively easy and requires very little setup.

backend

Ethereum’s backend stack also received its first major overhaul. Viktor worked incredibly hard to reimplement the download manager and the Ethereum subprotocol.

corps

From day one of Dani joining the team, she has been passionately committed to the following: Peer selection algorithm and Distributed pre-image archive. DPA is used in Swarm technology. The specification is approximately 95% complete and approximately 50% implemented. Progress is picking up!

both Gothereum/p2p and Gothereum/Whisper It was developed in a way that Ethereum does not need to operate. If you’re developing in Go and your application requires peer-to-peer networking or (dark) messaging, try the package. Example subprotocols can be found here here You can find examples of how to use Whisper. here.

Arms Hub

now hob It’s finally ready. Feel free to stop by and have a coffee with us. You can find us in the rather posh Amsterdam Zuid area, near the Museumplein (Alexander Boerstraat 21).

We hope to see a release candidate for PoC-8 and a draft implementation of PoC-8 in our next post. corps. But until then, happy whispering and sunshine!